What? This is so weird. AM offering cloud mining? That's really the last thing I expected. Frankly until I hear it from friedcat I'm pretty skeptical about all of this.
they talked about it at the saloon...... cloud mining for customers would be in the pipeline of progression due to the cheap electricity they could offer.
If they have cheap electricity... why not just self-mine? Cloud mining just seems like a way to defer capital costs.
I think also part of a long term strategy, in that AM in the past has demonstrated that they are conscious about not wanting to disrupt the network by owning a large share of it (say 40 or 50%). Franchising and cloud mining are avenues to manufacture chips and miners for more than their share of the network, and still seeing profits trickle back to AM from those. It also works in the scalability sense, it might be unrealistic to scale a self mining operation up as required to maintain a large percentage of the network indefinitely (space and electricity are limited), so having these other avenues available serves as a proxy while internal development continues at a fixed pace.